


Duty's to Be Done (To Be Done)

by Prochytes



Category: Ashes to Ashes, Castle, Inspector Morse (TV), Life on Mars (UK), Torchwood
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-07
Updated: 2012-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-29 03:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anyone who has ever been a copper might run into Gene Hunt. Sooner or later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Duty's to Be Done (To Be Done)

**Author's Note:**

> Significant spoilers for Ashes to Ashes 3x08 and for Castle to the end of Season Three; small spoilers for TW to “Children of Earth: Day One”. Originally posted on LJ in 2012.

1\. The Far Country.

Detective Inspector E. (first name smeared in the file, and the subject of much fruitless speculation at the Station) Morse was transferred up (or, as he insisted, “down”) from Oxford just after Gene made DCI. This was long before the coming of Sam Tyler, and even longer before Gene himself worked out what was going on. Unlike Tyler, or Bolly, Morse did not rant about the future. He was a cagey sod, who played his cards very close to his chest. And if he sometimes seemed more than a little out of place... well, Gene suspected that old Semaphore had spent a whole long lifetime not belonging.

He wasn’t an easy man to like. He was a snooty Southern bastard; he was too bleeding clever by about three quarters; those LPs he played did Gene’s head in; and extracting a round from him was practically a surgical procedure. But he knew his classic motors, and there was no better man to have at your side when the corpses were dropping like flies and your only lead was graffiti written in Sanskrit.

Once, at a lock-in after wrapping up a burglary, when they were both seven pints down, he confessed to Gene that one of his few real mates had been a Geordie. Gene was a big enough man not to hold that against him. Much.

 Gene never knew for sure why Morse disappeared. He had been in a funny mood for several days, and kept quoting lines from one of those endless effing poets of his:  _And Apollo gave Sarpedon dead to be borne by swift companions, to Death and Sleep, twin brethren, who bore him through the air to Lycia, that broad and pleasant land_. Much later, Gene suspected that Morse had worked out The Answer by himself, and then simply made his own arrangements. He had always been good at ferreting out the boozer where he needed to be, had Morse, even if he forked out reluctantly once he got there.

Gene would have stirred molten lead with his todger before admitting that the sour old bastard had rubbed off on him in any way whatsoever. But Bolly got the shock of her life when she bet Gene a fiver that he couldn’t identify what was playing one night ( _E lucevan le stelle_ ) on the background music at Luigi’s.

Morse left behind him a stack of LPs, a bottle of whisky, and a London Times, folded at the crossword. All the squares had been inked in (smart-arse), but Morse had added an extra clue beneath the grid: “Craftily evade our number – or try! (9)”. Sam Tyler pissed himself with laughing when he heard that part of the story, long after, but never told Gene why.

2\. The Searchers.

“First off, she’s a plonk,” said Ray. “Can’t have an American plonk. It ain’t natural.”

“Course you can,” said Shaz. “Look at _Falcon Crest_.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

“Second, she’s posh. How can you be a Yank _and_ posh?”

This philosophical conundrum exercised Ray’s faculties through two domestics, an ABH, and one very optimistic flasher in Barmy Park. But the enigma of Kate Beckett (lately seconded from the NYPD) stayed unresolved.

Beckett was a tall, skinny brunette sort, with legs up to here, who talked like Katherine Hepburn and punched like Joe Bugner. She could have been Bolly’s Transatlantic twin. Indeed, this was originally DI Drake’s own hypothesis. “I’m fairly sure Beckett’s a _Doppelgänger_ ,” she confided to Shaz. Even by Bolly’s standards, this utterance struck the eavesdropping Ray as mental, until Shaz explained that a _Doppelgänger_ was a double and not, as he had thought, a German beer.

Bolly apparently changed her mind later in the American’s stay, even though the two kept discovering new affinities, such as a shared obsession with lady lawyers. By the end, they were thick as thieves. Bolly even helped Beckett order files from the States on some cases in which she was interested. “It all goes way back,” Ray overheard her saying once, as Bolly nodded. “A long way before Montgomery. It was at his funeral that I was sh...” Then she saw Ray coming, and stopped talking. Ray was not offended. His raw, animal presence took a lot of birds like that.

It was not long, however, before Beckett was recalled to where she had come from. 

“Shame your mate had to hop it, Bolly,” said the Guv, afterwards. He looked again at the signature on the paperwork. “She was a good officer, for a Yank. I hope this bloke who called her back knows what he’s getting. ’Cos he definitely doesn’t know how to spell ‘Derek’.”

3\. Cowboys and Aliens.

After Bolly’s departure, when Gene finally understood the nature of his calling, it was clearer to him why officers who had just been transferred to his team were not usually in a tranquil state of mind. But the Taff plonk, Gwen Cooper, struck him as so far off her trolley that she was actually outside the supermarket. Her initial theory, once she saw the photos in Gene’s office, was that she had been subjected to a global campaign of hypnotism, probably involving satellites, orchestrated by Sam Tyler, whom she seemed to have mistaken for someone else. She was also, by some distance, the mouthiest tart that Gene had ever encountered. Gene found himself experiencing nostalgia for the serene and equable temperament of Bolly.

Stilll, she was a bloody fine copper, as long as you didn’t get her started on her little green men (although she always claimed that the little ones were never green, immature Ice Warriors excepted). This meant that Gene reacted even worse than usual when that slimy bastard Keats started sniffing around her.

“This one’s mine, Gene,” the little shit said to him. “Just you wait and see.”

Gene was not seriously fazed by this. Taff had her head screwed on straight, he reasoned, provided the subject wasn’t aliens. He had warned her about Keats’ soft sell, noting in particular that she should not allow herself to be tempted by the promise of big guns. (Cooper had a craving for ordnance that even Raymondo would have found a bit unsettling.  She practically had to change her knickers if you showed her a good sawn-off.) Nothing at all to worry about.

He took his eye off the ball so completely, in fact, that he only tumbled what was happening when Cooper was already inside the lift, with her finger hovering over the button. Keats was standing beside her with an oily grin on his smug mug, like he’d just called in a case of indecent exposure from the Garden of Eden. And that was when Gene saw the truth. Keats hadn’t needed the soft sell this time. Cooper realized where she was going. She had chosen Keats’ Division because she thought she deserved it.

“You don’t know what I was, Guv,” she said softly. The long dark hair, streaked with grey, had hidden her face. “You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“I know this, missy. You never stopped being a copper, Gwen Cooper, even if your manor got a bit peculiar. And answer me this: in that future of yours, have you seen the world with people like him in charge?”

Something there must have struck home. She lifted her head; threw Gene a brief, fierce smile; and kneed Jim Keats so hard in the undercarriage it was a wonder that he didn’t spit out his bollocks. Being obliged to support Cardiff City for decades clearly filled a girl with a lot of hate. Gene’s eyes almost watered on Keats’ behalf. Almost, but not quite. Sympathy for the Devil had never been his song.

So they went out, and wrapped up the case, and Gene drove Gwen Cooper to the _Railway Arms_. They stood outside for a while, while Gwen talked about her husband, and the daughter whom she had left finishing up her PhD., and her old boss.

“Sounds like a right flash bastard, that one. Was he a copper, too?”

“Maybe. He turned his hand to a lot of trades.” Gwen paused at the doorway of the pub, and smiled. “But I honestly don’t think you’ll ever meet him.” 

FINIS

 

**Author's Note:**

> The passage that Morse quotes is a loose translation of Homer "Iliad" 16.681-3.


End file.
